Abstract
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools is a novel foray into a genre previously associated with so-called “transitional” democracies from the post-Communist world and the global South. This basic fact notwithstanding, a systematic comparison with the broader universe of truth commission-hosting countries reveals that the circumstances surrounding the Canadian TRC are not entirely novel. This article develops this argument by distilling from the transitional justice literature several bases of comparison designed to explain how a truth commission’s capacity to promote new cultures of justice and accountability in the wake of massive violations of human rights is affected by the socio-political context in which the commission occurs; the injustices it is asked to investigate; and the nature of its mandate. It concludes that these factors, compounded by considerations unique to the Canadian context, all militate against success. If Canadian citizens and policymakers fail to meet this profound ethical challenge, they will find themselves occupying the transition-wrecking role played more familiarly by the recalcitrant and unreformed military and security forces in the world’s more evidently authoritarian states.
Highlights
This article takes a somewhat contrary position
For more than a century, successive Canadian federal governments of transitional justice with which truth commissions are associated, it operated a policy that took over 100,000 Native children from their argues that many of the most daunting obstacles facing the Canadian families and placed them in residential schools operated by the coun- commission are familiar ones and that international experitry’s major Christian denominations.[1]
What is disconcerting is that the with the specific goal of eradicating Indigenous languages and cul- Canadian obstacles are precisely those that have been widely associtures, a goal the schools sought to achieve by separating children ated with past failures of truth commissions to satisfactorily address from their families and communities, denigrating Native traditions their countries’ experiences of authoritarian or dictatorial rule
Summary
En dépit de ce fait essentiel, une comparaison méthodique au sein de l’univers des pays hôtes de commissions de vérité révèle que les circonstances entourant la CTR du Canada ne sont pas entièrement nouvelles. L’article déploie cet argument par l’examen dans la littérature sur la justice en transition de nombreuses bases de comparaison, et ainsi expliquer comment la capacité d’une commission de vérité à promouvoir de nouvelles cultures de justice et de responsabilité à la suite d’importantes violations des droits humains est affectée par le contexte sociopolitique dans lequel survient la commission, par les injustices qu’elle est chargée d’examiner, ainsi que par la nature de son mandat. Si les citoyens et stratèges politiques canadiens ne relèvent pas ce profond défi éthique, ils feront alors figure de saboteurs de transitions, un rôle généralement attribué aux forces de sécurité et aux forces militaires récalcitrantes et non-réformées des États plus ouvertement autoritaires. UNCOMFORTABLE COMPARISONS: THE CANADIAN TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
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